Is Yoast SEO Premium Worth It?

Yoast SEO Premium is without a doubt a solid plugin, but is it worth $89 a year? Will you gain more traffic from using it? Should you purchase this plugin? In this article, I will attempt to answer all of these questions.

In a recent video, on our Youtube channel, I went a step further and detailed all of the features of the plugin. This may help sway your decision on whether Yoast SEO Premium is right for you.

Will I Get More Traffic From Yoast SEO Premium?

One of the biggest misnomers in the WordPress community is that one SEO plugin is going to get you more traffic than another. This is more or less a myth. Most SEO plugins do the same basic thing. They allow you to create a sitemap, manage meta descriptions/titles and give you suggestions to further optimize your content. Swapping from one SEO plugin to another isn’t going to dramatically increase your ranking.

At the moment, the phrase “content is king,” in my opinion, is very accurate. You can’t expect adding schema markup or improving your meta descriptions to increase your traffic multiple times over. This is especially true with local SEO. You need to add content to your website that people want to read. For example, content that helps answer a question or provides some sort of entertainment.

Therefore, the question should be, “Will Yoast SEO Premium make my content better?” The answer, in my opinion, is yes. The most useful functionality in Yoast SEO Premium that solves a major problem is the internal link suggestion tool. The concept is simple and yet also genius. As you write content, the tool will generate a list of articles that it determines to be related to the piece you’re writing. You can then easily link to those posts, which improves your traffic as it allows users to read additional content. But it also makes the content more useful for your users. There isn’t another SEO plugin that offers this sort of functionality. Auto Linking random words and/or phrases to your posts isn’t a good fix and it doesn’t scale well from a performance perspective.

To answer the question of whether Yoast SEO Premium will get you more traffic, the answer is no. There is no direct improvement in ranking, by simply purchasing Yoast SEO Premium. However, following the recommendations Yoast SEO Premium gives and linking your content can lead to a higher rank in Google search.

Who Should Use This Plugin?

This is a difficult question to answer. However, if you are starting a new blog or doing affiliate marketing and not making any money, then I wouldn’t recommend buying it. Strictly from a business perspective, you have to look at the cost benefit analysis. Would you rather pay $89, which could take you months to recoup on a new website or wait and focus on content? However, if you’re a large publisher or a small business who can afford the upfront cost, go for it. Yoast SEO Premium can help your articles rank better and can keep users on your site longer.

It really comes down to two things.

1. Do you have the disposable income? 2. How long are you willing to wait for the ROI on your website?

What Features Are There?

Yoast SEO Premium comes with quite a few features, but many of them I simply don’t think justify the price. So let’s look at the features below.

Redirect Manager: The redirect manager is a great tool in the plugin. It works as expected and the automatic redirect on URL changes is a great feature. However, there are free alternatives for this same feature. So I can’t say this is worth it solely because it is good. The Redirection plugin does functionally the same thing; but is free, comes with a 404 monitor, and can monitor your redirects.

Multiple Keyphrases: I am not that impressed with this feature personally, but most of my content is focused around a single question. So this feature can be useful, but in my use case, it currently isn’t. That being said, it is a nice feature to have.

“No Outdated Content”: This is a bit inaccurate to say the least, as it really only works if you’re making use of the cornerstone feature; which I have yet to run across a single client website where they were.

Facebook & Twitter Previews: This feature works as expected, but it’s nothing amazing. If you have a strong social media game though this feature is a must but it’s not a reason to buy Yoast SEO Premium.

Internal Link Suggestions: Best feature in the entire plugin. I would say 90% of websites I work on, forget to link their new posts to their existing content and this solves that problem. I highly recommend this feature and this is why I purchased it.

Focus Keyword Export: This is a nice tool to have, but I don’t make use of it personally. However if you need this feature, you have to purchase Yoast SEO Premium to get it.

Should I Buy Yoast SEO Premium?

If you’re looking to invest in your websites content and are in need of additional suggestions, Yoast SEO Premium is worth the investment. It comes with a great internal link suggestion tool and it’s a good addition to your website. If you’re just starting out though and are unsure if its worth your money, I would say probably not. For comparison you can get most themes on Themeforest for less than $60 for lifetime updates. Yoast SEO Premium in comparison requires a yearly subscription and while this works great. It’s value proposition is still quite low.

My suggestion to the developers is to look at adding new features to the plugin that make it more desirable. Maybe consider adding some new Gutenberg Blocks exclusive to the premium version, such as a Table Of Contents block or a Review block.